This year’s packed conference came to a close on March 21, 2014: Day 5 at TED2014. Here are some highlights from this Friday:

Mark Ronson ruled the dance floor

On Thursday night, Mark Ronson DJ’d for TEDsters. Bent over the mixing board under a neon green TED sign, he tied all the music back to his talk, playing a set list that demonstrated how fragments of classic songs recur and evolve as they’re sampled by new generations.

Chris Kluwe juggled a whole bunch of balls in bowls

To open session 11, the Raspyni Brothers outfitted Chris Kluwe in a rather unusual getup: a T-ball helmet with a spike on top. They then managed to make him hold three spinning glass bowls — one on his head and two in his hands — with a bunch of bouncing balls in them. He even stood on one leg. Because, you know, why not?

Kevin Briggs reminded us that a listening ear is sometimes all it takes

Sergeant Kevin Briggs told powerful stories from his experience as a keeper of the Golden Gate Bridge — a first responder when someone is about to commit suicide by jumping off the bridge. He said that listening is critical, and often makes the difference between someone jumping or choosing to live. “Listen to understand,” he said. “Don’t argue or blame or say you know how they feel.” In his entire career, he has only lost two people to suicide — “two people too many,” in his view.

Gabby Giffords brought the whole audience to tears

Discussing the aftermath of the Arizona shooting, Gabby Giffords gave a touching interview with her husband, Mark Kelly, moderated by Pat Mitchell, president and CEO of the Paley Center for Media. The bullet wound caused aphasia, making it difficult for Gabby to put her thoughts into words, so Mark lovingly helped her tell their story — including the awesome fact that their first date was a visit to death row in an Arizona prison. (Um, what?) While the experience has been tough, Gabby said she prefers the ‘new’ Gabby: “better, stronger, tougher.” She also had a message for the audience: “Get involved with your community. Be a leader. Be passionate, be courageous, be your best self.”

Andrew Solomon delivered a pitch-perfect talk on identity and meaning

How do you even sum up an Andrew Solomon talk? We’ll be brief: it was a stunningly eloquent, devastatingly honest meditation on how we have the greatest opportunity to heal and grow when we forge our own meaning from difficult experiences. As he reflected on his life now — a beautiful life forged out of years of bullying and shame — he said, “I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys, because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me.” Dagger through the heart. Everyone melted.

Julia Sweeney showed up on the telepresence robot

In a raucous final talk, comedian Julia Sweeney gave a hilarious recap of the conference. She started by wheeling out on the telepresence robot (yup, the same one Snowden used in his talk) and joking about being in a remote, undisclosed location backstage. The #snowbot will never get old.

And that’s a wrap, folks! Thanks for making TED2014 such a fantastic year. We look forward to sharing the talks with you online!

We live most of our lives wired and wound up, rarely pausing to relax or unplug from the daily grind. Our speakers in this session discuss the consequences of our ever-hectic lives, and remind us of the qualities we sometimes forget to foster. They include an author discussing why modern parenthood is out of whack, a leadership expert encouraging business leaders to focus on what really matters, a sergeant who talks people down from suicide, and more.

Here are the speakers who appeared in this session. Click on the speaker’s name to read about their talk.

For the final sessions of TED@Aspen, we packed into the main hall of Doerr-Hosier for the Kids’ Table Collective — Rives, Jill Sobule, Ze Frank and the Raspyni Brothers (special appearance by Jennifer O’Donnell). Thrilling stunts and comedy and a standing ovation from the kids in Monterey capped off a week of conversation and connection. Our large Australian contingent presented the Ozzie version of the Big Questions (though — did Chris Anderson really call Australians “the greatest threat to TED … as we know it”?), and a couple of Aspenites a-a-almost won a stage prize. But more than anything, Day Four was a day to reflect on what we created here, in the first year of TED@Aspen: a community of people forming our own traditions around some Ideas Worth Spreading. Watch for reflections in the weeks to come from our TED@Aspen bloggers.

Overheard on the final day of TED@Aspen:

Putting together the big idea that links David Gallo and Bill Lange’s work at Woods Hole, Robert Ballard’s talk on undersea exploration, and the WorldWide Telescope:“[Forget] outer space — when do we get Google Ocean?”

In a reflective mood on the shuttle to the airport:“There was one missing question: To be, or not to be? To have the tenacity to do something great, or to quit?”

During rehearsal for the Kids’ Table Collective:“I’ll take the mushrooms and the double-stick tape and figure something out.”

Via Twitter, onepinktee writes:“another big question for TEDizens: what will you do next? #TED”

John Francis calls himself a "planetwalker". From 1983 to 2005, he
walked around North and Nouth America carrying a message of respect for
the Earth — and for 17 of those years, he did so without speaking (all
while learning a degree in environmental studies and a PhD in land
resources). (A profile of him in Sierra magazine).
I’ve been silent for 17 years. When I first spoke, I turned around to hear my own voice. I want to take you on this journey, even though this one is kind of unusual I want you to think of your own. My journey begain in 1971 when I witnessed two oil tankers collide under the Golden Gate bridge and half a million gallons of oil spilled out. It so disturbed me that I decided to give up driving cars — and that’s quite a big thing in California. People would ask me "What are you doing" and as I said that I was "walking for the environment" they said: "No, you’re just doing that to make us look bad, feel bad". I argued so much about that that on my 27th birthday I decided I would give it a rest, and stop talking for one day. It was very moving, because I began truly listening, and it was very sad for me because I realized that until then I had not really been learning. So I decided to do it for another day, and another day, until finally I promised myself that for one year I would keep quiet, and then on my birthday reassess what I had learned. That lasted 17 years. During that time I walked and played the banjo and wrote my journal and tried to study the environment by reading books and go to school. So I did, I walked to Oregon — 500 miles — and went into the registrar office and in two years I graduated with my first degree. And then I started walking again, to Washington, then to Montana. I’d written to the University of Montana two years earlier telling them that I would like to go to school there and I would be there in two years. They helped me, figuring out ways for me to get grades despite I didn’t have the money and I didn’t speak. I went on to the University of Wisconsin, and spent two years there writing about oil spills. And something happened: I was the only one in the US writing about oil spills. I went on, it took me 17 years and 1 day to walk around the US. My journey kept going on. I wrote for the US Coast Guard, I wrote oil spills regulations.I started talking because I had studied environment at a formal level, but there was an informal level, about people, and what we do and how we are. And environment changed from being about species and trees to be about how we treat ourselves and each other. So I had to spread that message. I still didn’t ride motorized vehicles. In my heart I had become a prisoner. The prison I was in was the fact that I did not drive or use motorized vehicles. When I started it seemed very appropriate to me. But at every birthday I asked myself about silence, but I never asked myself about my decision to use my feet. I realized that I had a responsibility to more than just me, and I was gonna have to change — and was afraid to change, because I was so used to the guy who just walked, that I didn’t know who I would be. But I knew I needed to change. Alot of times we find ourselves in this wonderful place where we’ve gotten to, but there is another place we have to go to, and we have to leave behind the security of who we have become and go go the place of who we are becoming.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written possibly one of the most
insightful books of the recent years. In "The Happiness Hypothesis", he
brings neuroscience and evolutionary psychology together with some of
the biggest ideas of philosophers and religious thinkers of the past,
trying to over come the idea that today we know better, and that those
great teachers had already discovered some of the true secrets of
happiness and of the meaning of life — and that they are quite
coherent with modern science.He studies morality and emotion in the
context of culture: why did we evolve to have morals, and to have
different morals? And what about the moral foundations of politics?Ideology and openness to experience is a discriminant of the way people behave.What is morality and where does it come from? The worst idea in all psychology is that the mind is a blank slate at birth. Truth is that we come to life already knowing alot. Nature provides a first draft, which then experience revises. Five foundations of morality:

Harm/care, that makes really bond with ohers, care for others

Fairness/reciprocity

Ingroup/loyalty, only among humans very large groups can join together and collaborate

Authority/respect

Purity/sanctity

If these are the five best candidates for what’s written in the first draft of our moral mind But as kids grow up, how is this first draft being modified? We’ve put a questionnaire online asking how people (conservatives and liberals) relate to these foundations of morality. Turns out that conservatives consider them very similarly; liberals are more attentive to the first two, less to the other three.What makes Ingroup, Authority and Purity moral? Order tends to decay. Loyalty is not enough, you need some sort of punishment to get people to cooperate in large group. Traditional morality uses every tool in the toolbox (including suppressing carnality etc) to make people collaborate, seek a higher end. Liberal morality rejects I/A/P. Liberals want change and justice even at risk of chaos; conservatives speak for institutions and traditions, and want order even at some cost for those at the bottom. So both liberals and conservatives have something to offer. Are conservatives and liberals like Yin and Yang? "If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between for and against is the mind’s worst disease" (Sent-ts’an, c. 700 CE). Compare that to George Bush "with us or against us". Our righteous minds were "designed" by evolution to unite us into teams, to divide us against other teams, and to blind us to the truth. As we heard from Samantha Power and her story of Sergio Vieira de Mello, we can’t just charge in. Alot of problems we have to solve require that we change other people, and if we want to change them, we need to understand our design, cultivate moral humility, and turn our understanding into a better future for us all.

British rockstar Bob Geldof is the closing speaker. In the late 1970s, Geldof was the leader of the Boomtown Rats, a British punk band. In the 1980s, he became a global activist, organizing Band Aid (to raise funds for the famine in Ethiopia), then, later, LiveAid. In 2005, he threw another giant global concert, Live8, trying to raise awareness for debt relief and poverty reduction. Since, he’s become active in alternative fuels and hybrid vehicles, and sees a link between fuel dependency and poverty-creating regimes. He calls TED "the Olympics of unreasonable people". There can’t be evolution of thought without differences, without challenges. Society needs to constantly test itself in order to get that change. Science can take us only so far. In the modern age, people are made a fetish of progress almost as an antidote of nihilism; we must believe that we’re moving forward, but sometimes science only adds a twist to a normal madness. I encountered that normal madness back in 1984, millions of people dying of poverty and hunger. In Europe, we paid taxes to produce food that we would never eat, and to destroy it. Eight miles south of Europe lied Africa, and 30 million people were dying of want, most very young. I was shocked, and I just thought that it wasn’t enough to do the usual dollar-in-the-box- I travelled around Africa and then went on TV and said that dying of want in a world of surplus was morally repulsive and also economically illiterate. The lingua franca of the planet is not English, it’s rock and roll, so we began that dialog in 1985. If the impulse of one human being to help another is not critical to the human spirit, then what is? The act of putting a dollar in the save-the-children box is a political act. It’s almost the political equivalent of the butterfly effect. If there are enough dollars, policy changes. If we are de-sensitized to the suffering of others something withers, something’s gone, some part of humanity is lost. But it drove me mad, there was no need for this to happen; poverty is an empirical condition.Africa will transform itself through technology, and the tech that will do it is the mobile phone.All of these things that happened to me are wrapped up in this idea: back in 1985 I trawled across the misery of others. I was in Niger. A politician told me: there were 300 separate languages here, and they’re gone. We can’t let that continue (see also Wade Davis’ speech). There is a great mapping of mankind to be undertaken, and that’s what I’m gonna do, with photos, music, film, text, and then we’re going to map the unfolding narrative of us, and we will watch ourselves unfold. Culture is the narrative of man, not politics. Human cultural diversity is as important to the life of the intellect as biological diversity is to nature. I want to build a Dictionary of Man, I want you to help me do so.

Friday at TED@Aspen, we hosted live Talks from Walter Isaacson, the head of the Aspen institute, and the wonderful Ze Frank. Between TED sessions via satellite, we heard from David Gallo and William Lange of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Joy Mountford sharing amazing data visualizations, Ron Dembo and his ZeroFootprint carbon calculator, Reto Schnyder and his thoughts on Max Frisch’s I’m Not Stiller, and the Raspyni Brothers — who put on a completely terrifying show that risked the life of the world’s greatest poker player, as they juggled bowling balls over Phil Gordon’s head.

The TED Prize lunch at Aspen Meadows was buzzing with great ideas, with a rich cross-pollination and connection among the three winners and their wishes. After we rocked the entire Doerr-Hosier Center with the “Ode to Joy,” we rode the Silver Queen gondola, 3,000 feet up Aspen Mountain into an amazing starry sky, for dancing, drinking and more amazing conversation.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/2008/03/01/lost_in_the_sta/feed/0tedstaffFluffThorne.jpg2302110011_1841fb4c22.jpgVaudeville 2.0: The Raspyni Brothers on TED.comhttp://blog.ted.com/2008/02/22/raspyni_brother/
http://blog.ted.com/2008/02/22/raspyni_brother/#commentsFri, 22 Feb 2008 08:00:00 +0000http://blog-staging.ted.com/2008/02/raspyni_brother/[…]]]>Illustrious jugglers the Raspyni Brothers (who’ll be in residence next week at TED@Aspen) show off their uncanny balance, agility, coordination and willingness to sacrifice (others). Now, if you’ll just stand completely still …(Recorded February 2002 in Monterey, California. Duration: 15:33.)